Silent Night was first sung as part of a church service in Austria.

A guitar was used because the church organ was

so badly rusted it couldnt be played.

In Germany there are many different characters for Christmas. Nikolaus comes on December 5th and on December
24th when the actual opening of the gifts is happening ,they have been brought either by
Knecht Ruprecht, Weihnachtsmann, or the Christkindl, (Christ child) wich is an angelic child dressed in a white and
or golden dress much like a long nightgown. It has wings, and has usually a small horse or a donkey as a
companion.


In Germany and some other western European countries, St. Nicholas , or Nikolaus comes on the night from the
5th to the 6th of Decemer, where children have their boots all shined and clean in front of a door or window. He
will leave toys, nuts oranges, apples and chocolate for the good children. The bad child gets a branch to be used by
the parents to punish the child.

Guatemalan adults do not exchange Christmas gifts until New Years Day. Children get theirs (from the Christ Child)
on Christmas morning.

In North America, children put stockings out at Christmas time. Their Dutch counterparts use shoes.
The poinsettia, a traditional Christmas flower, originally grew in Mexico, where it is also known as the Flower of
the Holy Night. Joel Poinsett first brought it to America in 1829.

When visiting Finland, Santa leaves his sleigh behind and rides on a goat named Ukko. Finnish folklore has it that
Ukko is made of straw, but is strong enough to carry Santa Claus anyway.

When distributing gifts in Holland, St. Nicholas is accompanied his servant, Black , who is responsible for actually
dropping the presents down their recipients chimneys. He also punishes bad children by putting them in a bag and
carrying them away to Spain.

The day after Christmas, December 26, is known as Boxing Day. It is also the holy day of St. Stephen.
In Syria, Christmas gifts are distributed by one of the Wise Mens camels. The gift-giving camel is said to have been
the smallest one in the Wise Mens caravan.

One town in Indiana is called Santa Claus. There is also a Santa, Idaho.

The popular Christmas song Jingle Bells was actually written for Thanksgiving. The song was composed in 1857
by James Pierpont, and was originally called One Horse Open Sleigh.

There are 364 gifts mentioned in The Twelve Days of Christmas.

The Puritans forbade the singing of Christmas carols.

George Frederick Handels great Christmas oratorio, The Messiah, was first performed in 1742, in Dublin.

Americas official national Christmas tree is located in Kings Canyon National Park in California. The tree, a giant
sequoia called the General Grant Tree, is over 90 meters (300 feet) high, and was made the official Christmas
tree in 1925.
The first Christmas was celebrated on December 25, AD 336 in Rome.

Artificial Christmas trees have outsold real ones since 1991.

St. Nicholas was bishop of the Turkish town of Myra in the early 4th century. The Dutch first made him into a
Christmas gift-giver, and Dutch settlers brought him to America where his name eventually became the familiar
Santa Claus.

In Armenia, the traditional Christmas Eve meal consists of fried fish, lettuce and spinach.
Christmas has different meanings around the world; Christmas Eve in Japan is a good day to eat fried chicken and
strawberry shortcake.

Alabama was the first state to recognize Christmas as an official holiday, and the tradition began in 1836.

Many of the traditions associated with Christmas (giving gifts, lighting a Yule log, singing carols, decorating an
evergreen) date back to older religions.

In 1647, the English parliament passed a law made Christmas illegal. The Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell, who
considered feasting and revelry on what was supposed to be a holy day to be immoral, banned the Christmas
festivities. The ban was lifted only when Cromwell lost power in 1660.

Michigan has no official state song, but one, Michigan, My Michigan, is frequently used. The words were written
in 1863, and the melody used is that of the Christmas song O Tannenbaum.

Franklin Pierce was the first president to decorate an official White House Christmas tree.

Christmas Crackers were invented around 1846 by Tom Smith who developed them for Christmas from the French
habit of wrapping sugared almonds in twists of paper as gifts.

J.S.Bach inscribed most of his musical scores with the note In dem Namen Jesus, or in English In the name of
Jesus.

The Canadian province of Nova Scotia leads the world in exporting lobster, wild blueberries, and Christmas trees.

Roast turkey did not appear consistently on royal Christmas Day menus until 1851 when it replaced roast swan.
The medieval dish of Boars head remained popular with Royals for much longer.
Electric Christmas lights were first used in 1854.

The holiday Boxing day was originally celebrated in England,for the servants to the rich people. After Chrismas,the
servants boxed up all the left-overs from the rich people and bring them home.

Can you feel the pulse in your wrist? For humans the normal pulse is 70 heartbeats per minute.

Elephants have a slower pulse of 27 and for a canary it is 1000!

If all the blood vessels in your body were laid end to end, they would reach about 60,000 miles.
Abraham Lincoln probably had a medical condition called Marfans syndrome. Some of its symptoms are extremely
long bones, curved spine, an arm span that is longer than the persons height, eye problems, heart problems and
very little fat. It is a rare, inherited condition.

In one day your heart beats 100,000 times.

Half your bodys red blood cells are replaced every seven days.

By the time you are 70 you will have easily drunk over 12,000 gallons of water.

Coughing can cause air to move through your windpipe faster than the speed of sound over a thousand feet per
second!

Germs only cause disease, right? But a common bacterium, E. Coli, found in the intestine helps us digest green
vegetables and beans (also making gases pew!). These same bacteria also make vitamin K, which causes blood to
clot. If we didnt have these germs we would bleed to death whenever we got a small cut!

It takes more muscles to frown than it does to smile.

That dust on rugs and your furniture is not only dirt. Its mostly made of dead skin cells. Everybody loses millions of
skin cells every day which fall on the floor and get kicked up to land on all the surfaces in a room. You could say,
Thats me all over.

It takes food seven seconds to go from the mouth to the stomach via the esophagus.

A humans small intestine is 6 meters long.

The human body is 75% water.

Your blood takes a very long trip through your body. If you could stretch out all of a humans blood vessels, they
would be about 60,000 miles long. Thats enough to go around the world twice.

The strongest bone in your body is the femur (thighbone), and its hollow!

The width of your armspan stretched out is the length of your whole body.

The average human dream lasts only 2 to 3 seconds.

The average American over fifty will have spent 5 years waiting in lines.

The farthest you can see with the naked eye is 2.4 million light years away!
(140,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles.) Thats the distance to the giant Andromeda Galaxy. You can see it easily as a
dim, large gray cloud almost directly overhead in a clear night sky.

The average person has at least seven dreams a night.

Your brain is move active and thinks more at night than during the day.

Your brain is 80% water.

85% of the population can curl their tongue into a tube.

Your tongue has 3,000 taste buds.

Your forearm (from inside of elbow to inside of wrist) is the same length as your foot.

A sneeze travels at over 100 miles per hour. Gesundheit!

Your thigh bone is stronger than concrete.

Your fingernails grow almost four times as fast as your toenails.

You blink your eyes over 10,000,000 a year.

There were about 300 bones in your body when you were born, but by the time you reach adulthood you only
have 206.

The smallest bones in the human body are in your ear!

Your mouth uses 75 muscles when you speak!

When you wake up in the morning you are at taller than when you go to sleep, because you have let your spine
straighten back out after all the bending, sitting, and moving you have done!

It is impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.

The average growth of hair is half an inch per month.

If hair remains uncut, it can grow up to 5 feet long.

Your tongue, eye, and jaw muscles are among the strongest muscles in your body.

The Philippines ranks 12th among the most populous countries in the world, the population of this country is
about 90 million people.

The Philippines has more than 200 volcanoes, although only some of them are active.

The flag of the Philippines the only flag in the world, where colors can be reversed: in wartime, the upper band is
red, the bottom of the blue, and in times of peace on the contrary.

There are Rice Terraces on the slopes of the Philippine Cordilleras, whose history is two thousand years old. They
are considered a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The first European who visit the Philippines is a Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan.
7. The highest point in the Philippines Mount Apo, located on the Mindanao island, it reaches a height of 2,954
meters.

8. About 80% of the total population are Catholics.

9. Filipinos have a different ethnic background, such as Malay, Chinese, Spanish, American, etc.

10. The country got its name in honor of the Spanish King Philip II.

11. The capital city of the Philippines Manila is named in honor of a mangrove tree with white flowers (nilad).

12. In the period from 1521 to 1898 years, the Philippines was a Spanish colony. After, the archipelago became the
property of the United States.

18. Despite the fact that the land area of the Philippines is about 1/30th of the U.S. Area, the coastline of the
Philippines extends for 36,289 kilometers, while in the U.S. Only 19,924 kilometers.

19. Despite popular belief, karaoke was invented in the Philippines, but not in Japan. Karaoke invented by Roberto
Del Rosario, calling it Sing along with the system. And the name karaoke came later, translated from the
Japanese it means singing without accompaniment.

20. The most rare and expensive shell in the world Conus Gloriamaris one of the 12,000 species of seashells
found in the Philippines. In addition, of the 500 known coral species in the world, about 488 have been found on
the archipelago of .

21. Tribes Tianjin and Integ, living in the mountainous areas of the northern Philippines, kissing each other in a
special way. They advance lips together and quickly inhaled.

22. Traditional ancient Philippine toy yo-yo used as a weapon at first.

24. The safe in the geological sense Philippine called Palawan. It is the most distant from the volcanoes and
earthquake areas.

25. The most popular month for weddings in the Philippines is December (until early January), and not June.

23. Aurora the only Philippine province, named in honor of the first lady.

26. The first representatives of the Philippines who have reached the top of the hit parade Top 100 songs of the
Billboard was the band Rocky Fellers of Manila.
27. There are only two seasons a warm wet season and cool dry season in the Philippines. The dry season lasts
from October to June, and wet for the remainder of the year.
28. In the course of the history of the Philippines had early contact with China, some of the Arab countries and
Cambodia, but the archipelago was not known to the Western world until the 17th March 1521, when Magellan
arrived to the Samar island. Since then the Philippines was a colony of many countries such as: Spain, Portugal, the
United States and Japan.
29. Philippine University of San Carlos in Cebu City, founded by the Spanish in 1595, is superior in age from Harvard
University and is the oldest university in Asia. The second-oldest institution of higher education is Asia the
University of Santo Tomas in Manila, founded in 1611.
30. Filipino doctor Abelardo Aguilar discovered the antibiotic erythromycin.
31. A video camera with a single chip was first created by Marc Loinaz a Filipino inventor from New Jersey.
32. The first International Grandmaster from Asia was Eugenio Torre, who won the Chess Olympiad, held in 1974 in
Nice (France).
33. The fluorescent lamp was invented by Agapito Flores Filipino scientists from the island of Cebu.
34. Two Filipino beauty, Gloria Diaz and Margie Morgan received the title of Miss Universe beauty pageants in
1969 and 1973.
24. The safe in the geological sense Philippine called Palawan. It is the most distant from the volcanoes and
earthquake areas.
25. The most popular month for weddings in the Philippines is December (until early January), and not June.
24. The safe in the geological sense Philippine called Palawan. It is the most distant from the volcanoes and
earthquake areas.
25. The most popular month for weddings in the Philippines is December (until early January), and not June.
James Naismith, a teacher at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts, is credited with inventing basketball in 1891.
The first hoops were actually just peach baskets and the first backboards were made of wire.
The game became an official Olympic event at the Summer Games in Berlin, Germany in 1936.
Two leagues called the National Basketball League (NBL) and the Basketball Association of America (BAA) merged
after the 1948-49 season to become today's National Basketball Association (NBA).
The Boston Celtics have won the most NBA championships (17), including seven straight from 1960 to 1966.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who played 20 seasons in the NBA, holds the record for most points scored in a career with
38,387.
On March 2, 1962, Philadelphia center Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in one game against New York. That is
the most one player has ever scored in one game.
Current Atlanta Hawks coach Lenny Wilkens has won more basketball games than any other coach.
The American Basketball Association (ABA) was a 10-team rival league to the NBA that began play in the 1967-68
season and folded nine years later after the 1975-76 season. Four current NBA teams Indiana, Denver, New York,
and San Antonio originated in the ABA.
The NBA instituted the three-pointer before the 1979-80 season, an idea it borrowed from the ABA.
The Chicago Bulls have won all six NBA Finals in which they've appeared.
The chameleon has a tongue that is 1.5 times the length of its body!
Did you know porpoises could surf? They are frequently seen riding the bow wave of a ship. They make no
swimming motions and can ride the wake for more than an hour. They can also turn on their side or flip completely
around. Surfs up porpe!
Fish swimming at depths of 15,000 feet (almost 3 miles down!) can withstand a pressure of 7,000 pounds per
square inch. They are able to live in these crushing depths by pumping gas into their swim bladder.
You may have heard someone say, Its raining cats and dogs. There have been actual documented cases from
all over the world of fish, frogs, dead birds, snakes, snails, beetles, worms and jellyfish raining down from the sky in
great numbers, but no reports of showers of cats or dogs.
The blue whale, the largest animal to have ever existed, is 96 feet long and weights 125 tons. This is as much as 4
large dinosaurs (Brontosauri), 23 elephants, 230 cows or 1800 men.
Some animals produce their own lights, called bioluminescence. The Brazilian railroad worm has a red light on its
head and green lights down its side. All it needs to drive on the street is a turn signal.
The fastest bird is the peregrine falcon. It can fly at a speed of 168-217 miles per hour.
The largest egg laid by a living bird is that of the North African Ostrich. It is 6 to 8 inches in length and 4 to 6 inches
in diameter. The smallest is that of the hummingbird. It is less than 0.39 inches in diameter.
Whether an alligator is a male or female can be determined by the temperature of the nest where the egg is
hatched 90 to 93 degrees will make it a male; 82 to 86 degrees will turn it into a female.
Animals with some of the longest lives are the Marions tortoise (152 years), the fin whale (116 years) and the
deep-sea clam (100 years).
An electric eel can produce a shock of 600 volts. Thats enough to stun large animals even knock a horse off
its feet.
Cows can sleep standing up.
Salamanders are known to come out of wood when it was burning inside a fireplace, this is because Salamanders
hibernate in wood.
Some frogs can pull their eyes into their throat and help push food down!
An African adult elephant eats about six hundred pounds of food a day; thats four percent of the
elephants body weight!
The smallest fish in the world are the pygmy goby and the Luzon goby, from the Philippines, which are only one-
half-inch long when they are full grown.
The 14-foot-long narwhal is a whale whose tooth can reach up to eight feet long!
Chimpanzees use tools more than any other animal except man.
Elephants purr like cats do, as a means of communication.
The mandrill baboon has a red nose, blue cheeks, and an orange beard!
Hummingbirds flap their wings between 50 and 70 times a second!
When an octopus gets angry, it shoots a stream of black ink.
There are about 100 billion birds in the world, and about 6 billion of them make their homes in the United States.
The emperor penguin is playful, and often times lies on its chest and side to slide along the ice and snow.
The leatherback is the biggest sea turtle, and it can weigh as much as 1,500 pounds.
The snapping shrimp, only 1 1/2 inches long, makes a noise with its one big claw, which sounds exactly like a
firecracker.
Flying fish actually glide on wind currents above the surface of the water, sometimes up to 20 feet above the
surface.
Sea snakes are the most poisonous snakes in the world.
Adult male giraffes bang their long necks together in a form of ritual fighting, during which no harm is done to
either giraffe.
The stonefish, which lives off the coast of Australia, is the most poisonous fish in the world.
The black-necked cobra, which lives mostly in Africa, spits its venom into the eyes of its victim, to cause it
blindness.
When two lovebirds appear to be kissing, they are actually grooming each other with their bills to keep clean and
neat.
A bird called the bee eater in areas of Africa thinks that riding around on the backs of other animals is fun!
The dipper bird builds nests behind waterfalls for protection.
Vultures can soar for hours without one beat of their wings.
Sea horses pull themselves around with their chins leading them.
Foxes sometimes nip at the heals of cattle so the stomping of the cattle makes mice and other rodents come out of
the ground, for the fox to eat.
The guanaco of South America, a cousin of the camel, has pads on its feet to keep its feet from burning on desert
sand or freezing in mountain snow.
The fiddler crab can grow a new claw when it loses one of its own.
Blue jays often forget where they hide winter supplies of food.
The largest bird egg ever laid was laid millions of years ago by the Madagascar, or the elephant bird.
Today, the ostrich is the bird that lays the largest eggs.
Scallops swim with jet-propelled speed by clapping its shell open and shut.
Some ducks and geese can fly as much as 332 miles a day!
The lung fish can live out of water for as long as four years!
The Egyptian vulture uses stones to smash ostrich eggs.
Birds save energy by flying in a V formation.
Theodore Roosevelt was the U.S. President with the most pets, including a lion, hyena, wildcat, five bears, and
many more!
Killer Whales are the only sea animal that outranks the Tiger Shark as top predator of the sea.
Salamanders breath through their skin.
People used to think the Manatee was a mermaid.
Some fish have eyes that are the same size as their stomach!
A female seahorse lets her husband store her babies inside his stomach!
There are as many hairs per square inch on your body as a chimpanzee.You dont see all of them because most are
too fine and light to be noticed.
The bee frog of Africa is no bigger than a bee.
An okapis tongue can grow to be 17 inches long.
Cows have four-chambered stomachs.
Fish have gel-slime on their bodies that protects them from parasites.
An owls eyes are bigger than its brain.
The faster kangaroos hop, the less energy they use.
The flying fox of Africa has a wingspan of fifty inches!